LINKS: Weekly link summary in case you missed any of the individual posts (weekly)

Slightly confusing, but what the headline really means is “there are many instances where police used more bullets against 1 person than Germany used in an entire year against all criminals in the country”.

Now, if you extrapolate out the fact that the U.S. population is almost 4 times that of Germany’s, the real number to compare is not 85 shots, but about 340 shots.

Yeah…. It’s not just our larger population at work. When our police use more bullets in a single incident than a country previously associated with fascism does all year — it gives one major pause at how fucked up and broken our system is, and how piss-poor our over-militarized, trigger-happy police operate.

Not making assumptions here. I’ve worked them them, eaten lunch with them, and heard them talk about how they want someone to cause them to have a chance to shoot them. It’s sickening.

But anyway, here’s a story of a Jewish person who turned in the person raping his child, and was shunned by his community, harassed, and kicked out of his residence.

Hasidic Jews, that is. These are the hardcore orthodox types. People who take their supernatural beliefs way too seriously, and then inflict them on other people.

Religion has got to be one of the top enemies for children.

(Islam is even worse in that they don’t need to worry about covering up chid rape quite as much as the other religions, because Mohamad set the awesome example of marrying a six year old while he was in his 50s, and Sharia says you execute the rape victim, not the rapist, so what’s left to cover up?)

In general, fuck religious people. Even the ones that do no wrong help prop up communities like this by passing on supernatural beliefs that have nothing to do with the modern-day world. If you don’t like my attitude, here is a cup of I don’t give a fuck that you can drink.

This is basically looking like the same bullshit the pope and various bishops have pulled repeatedly.

Freshly released: Actual video of police killing a homeless man. The video is FORTY MINUTES IN LENGTH, with TWENTY MINUTES OF BRUTALITY.

If 6 officers couldn’t take this guy down in less than 20 minutes, none of them deserve to keep their job.

For once, the pigs are actually charged with murder and manslaughter. But wait. Only 2 of the 6 officers were actually charged. Seems to be that if you mindlessly dogpile onto an existing situation, you’re just fine. They never charge everyone who actually did it.

7.6/10 from both of us (imdb avg is 6.5/10).
4/5 stars from Carolyn, 3.6/5 stars from me
(avg Netflix is 3.9/5 stars, with a guess of 4.1 for us)

I call this Underworld 3 because it’s the 3rd non-prequel movie in the 4-movie franchise. We now have 0 through 3.

Anyway, this was an improvement over the 3rd movie, Underworld 0:Rise Of The Lycans. Kate Beckinsale is back, since she was barely in the prequel movie (though it’s easy enough to mistake Rhona Mitra for Kate, if you forget the eye color difference).

It’s been too long since the first two Underworld movies for me to really say whether this was any better or worse than 1-2.

The main twist here is that vampires and werewolves are now known to exist by the general public.

For the most part, this just feels like a Resident Evil movie. Moreso than any of the previous Underworld movies. Whether that is good or bad is your choice.

This had some good action, as expected — but the story could use a bit of work. The movie was kind of short. Not too much happened. There needs to be more movies in the franchise, because this one created more new issues than it resolved.

So yea, we liked this better than the general public, which is true for most movies.

I’m still trying to figure out why the general public — who spends more money on porn than all non-porn movies combined — tends to rate sex comedies so low. Are they upset they aren’t actual pornos?

This is a movie about cougars, and stars such older women as Fayne Dunaway, Carrie Fisher, Loretta Devine, and other 40-55 year old cougars. But it’s not a porno. There’s barely even nudity in it. The marketeers marketed toward the sex angle to capture peoples’ money, and I think that is what they are angry about. If you watch it not expecting much sex, the sex is simply a pleasant surprise instead of a disappointment.

We found it to be a fun movie. Nothing great, but a good testament about scenesters and creating scenes, and with some fun eroticism to boot. The Cougar Club in this movie could just as easily be ANY self-aggrandizing, private sex-themed party-throwing organization. The parallels were obvious. And the two bros that were main characters had a good comedic chemistry with each other, even if there was nothing uniuque about it.

But Amanda? God…The Amanda character was SOOOOOOO annoying. The filmmarkers did this on purpose, I think, to highlight the maturity of older women by showing how annoying a younger woman can be.

I did not realize one of the main characters had been in 8 episodes of 24! Weird.

4/5 stars, 8/10 from both of us, though the general public only rated it 2.7/5 stars (Netflix guessed 2.6 for us!) and 5.5/10.

This is the closest film I’ve ever seen to the movie Hardware (1990).

There are a few scenes that seem to be in DIRECT homage to Hardware. It lacks some of the comedy and psychedelia in Hardware, as well as the amazing cameos…

But in terms of cinematography, subject matter, style, and even character appearance (including the “villain”), this is simply a Poor Man’s Hardware. It even has William Hootkins (“we all sing, the wibbery-wobberly..walk!”), though he’s playing a suit instead of a perf.

Despite this being a poor man’s Hardware, it’s still better than 95% of scifi horror movies from the 1990s. So it gets 4/5 stars and 8/10, instead of the 5/5 stars and 9/10 rating that Hardware received.

Brad Dourif is pretty fricking crazy in this, and a lot of people are saying Heath Ledger must have watched this film at some point as inspiration for his insane portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight.

We watched the 111-minute (PAL/Europe) cut, though I would have preferred to get the 128 or 120-minute cut. Stay away from the 99-minute Netflix cut. You’ll be sorry. Get the PAL (europe) DVD if at all possible.

This movie also gets a very special LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD for having THE STRANGEST MARIJUANA JOINTS TO BE FEATURED IN ALL OF FILMDOM.

There is so much wrong with this, but could I really refuse to watch a Smurfs movie because I think it MIGHT be lame? No, I could not. Especially with Hank Azaria, Neil Patrick Harris, Jayma Mays (Hiro’s perfect match from Heroes), and Sofia Vergara.

And was it lame? Yes, in some ways.

Of course, the original 80’s cartoon is pretty goddamn lame if you sit down and watch an episode of it in 2012, so one could argue that this movie was actually an improvement. The problem is peoples’ rose-tinted nostalgia that causes them to reject everything made on an old idea. But The Smurfs WERE ALREADY AN OLD IDEA when they came to American television. The Smurfs as a franchise are 50 years old; the cartoon is only 30 years old. It was already an adaptation before it was adapted for this movie. So get over it. The movie was fun.

They went into the real world, which is a cheesy plot device used in so many cartoon movies, as well as an excuse to cheap out on the animation budget by using live-action people.

But there was also a real charm in seeing Gargamel as a ridiculous live-action person caught in a world he doesn’t belong to. He assumes homeless people are other wizards. It’s funny, in a 3rd Rock From the Sun Season 1 kind of way, to see someone try to figure out a world they don’t belong in.
And the CGI on Azrael was really cute.

When all is said and done, we have to admit to liking this movie, even if it wasn’t great.